Rides a Stranger by Bill Brooks

Author:Bill Brooks
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780061753220
Publisher: HarperCollins

Chapter Fifteen

A gun, a horse. What more did a man need to get by in this cruel old world? I asked myself. I probably looked pretty damn silly to the locals, riding a horse bareback with a pistol stuck down the waistband of my britches. I headed for those brown hills way off in the distance. I rode until nearly dark. The wind blew cold and I was damn near to shivering and hungry as a wolf. Ahead lay a deep purple veil of nightfall and something else. The wink of a campfire.

I rode toward it.

“Hello the camp,” I called.

“Come on in, friend.”

The voice sounded familiar.

It was Tom Twist there in the light, his Dutch oven steaming.

“You following me?” I said jokingly.

“Maybe I am,” he said.

“Hell of a technique you have—following a man by staying ahead of him.”

He offered me a plate of food.

“See you found yourself a horse after all.”

“I guess I wanted it bad enough, or God wanted me to have it,” I said a little sarcastically.

“Maybe so,” he said with some degree of confidence.

We squatted on our heels within the heat of the fire and ate.

“You figure out where it is you’re going yet?” I said after eating the stew he’d ladled onto a plate for me. It had potatoes and carrots and onions and some sort of meat chunks.

He shrugged. “Not yet, not exactly.”

“Well, I’m told the way you’re headed—I’m headed—will take us both right to Refugio.”

“Where you were when those lawmen got hold of you,” he said.

“Yes.”

“And it’s them you’re going to kill?”

“Kill, or use pretty hard,” I said. “They’ve got my horse, saddle, rifle, pistol, money, and some of my blood. I figure they owe me and I aim to collect.”

“Might not be worth it,” he said. “Results could be the same as they were last time, maybe even worse.”

“They’ve got something else they took too,” I said.

He looked at me, the light jumping on his face.

“A woman.”

“Oh,” he said. “Well a woman certainly does add to the drama.”

So I told him the whole story, about Antonia and Johnny Waco and all the rest and that what I was trying to do was something good for somebody and it had ended up costing me.

“We never do good simply for good’s sake,” he said. “You want some coffee?”

I nodded and he filled two cups and handed me one.

“How so?” I said.

“We mostly do good so we feel better about ourselves,” he said. “Yes, we might help another person, but we don’t do it for that reason alone. We do it because it makes us feel good. So it’s not entirely unselfish.”

“Does it matter?”

“Probably not.”

“I’m guessing you were in the God business at one time or the other.”

He simply smiled and said, “We’re all in the God business.”

Somewhere in the darkness I heard a dove coo. A moon like a china plate lifted into the night sky. Wind whispered to the fire and the fire whispered back.

“I saw you go into that church today.”

“A man needs respite and replenishing sometimes,” he said.

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